Wildling (2018)

Little Anna (Aviva Winick) has a pretty disturbing childhood. Being kept under lock and key in a cellar room by her “Daddy” (Brad Dourif, starting out wonderfully complicated until the film has him do his usual villain shtick), who likes to tell her frightening tales about a “Wildling” threatening little children is bad already. Once she starts menstruating, though, “Daddy” adds regular injections meant to suppress her cycle, adding a big load of creepiness. But hey, at least he taught her to read and write and never did any of the other things men keeping little children in cellars are wont to do.

When Anna hits about the age of sixteen (and has grown up to be played by Bel Powley), she begins wilting away; “Daddy”, propelled by guilt, clearly wavering between killing her and killing himself. decides to go with himself – though, as we will later learn, is not terribly successful as a suicide. The shot does summon the authorities, though, and Anna is off on her way to learn a lot of things about the bigger world outside. She’s in luck, too, for the local Sheriff Ellen Cooper (Liv Tyler) takes an interest in her and takes her in – at least for a time – for an attempt at a normal teenagehood. Ellen also takes care of her teenage brother Ray (Collin Kelly-Sordelet), their parents being absent for reasons, I guess.

Of course, the obligatory love story between the teens develops, but there’s also the fact that Anna’s not a normal human girl, but someone, something a bit wilder.

On paper, Fritz Böhm’s Wildling has quite a bit going for it – the cast is good to decent, the pictures are pretty, and the whole thing looks and feels slick enough for a film with one foot in horror and the other in the dreaded realm of YA. Alas, the script Böhm and Florian Eder deliver is just not terribly good, suffering from a debilitating vagueness in many things. The problem isn’t only that the film doesn’t really manage to ever do much of interest or insight with Anna’s identity as a furry wood human – it certainly wastes many an opportunity to say something about the connection between Anna’s “wildness”, female teenage sexual awakening, and her identity as something defined as other – it can’t seem to find its way to ever being concrete about anything. And I’m talking vagueness here, not ambiguity or any mystical attempt at touching the numinous.

It’s not just that nothing here is ever explained, the film is usually not even hinting, so if you’d like to know why the massacre of Anna’s people happened in the past you’re completely on your own. One might guess it’s the clichéd “humans hate everything that’s different”, but none of the guys hunting her ever says anything pertinent to the question whatsoever. The closest thing you get is when “Daddy” tells her he swore an oath to kill all of her kin, but why he did that, and to whom he made the oath? Beats me. As does what the actual function of the lifecycle of Anna’s people is, or what’s the deal of the guy dressed in dead wolves (James Le Gros) helping Anna out beyond being a walking talking plot device is.
Characterisation is equally vague: why does “Daddy” change his mind about murder and suicide again? Why does the Sheriff think dead boy next to the ripped dress of a girl spells murder instead of self defence by girl being raped? And so on, and so forth.


It’s all very frustrating, even more so because you could use most of Wildling’s elements to make a damn good film – a horror film, a fantastical coming of age movie, one about not being “normal” – yet the actual film at hand seems to avoid meaning anything concrete in any way possible.

In short: Super (2010)

Diner cook Frank (Rainn Wilson) loses his wife Sarah (Liv Tyler), a recovering drug addict, to the minor local drug lord Jacques (Kevin Bacon). Frank's clumsy attempts at getting her back lead nowhere, until his house's ceiling opens, God's tentacles open up Frank's brain pan, and God's finger touches his brain. Frank has a vision of Christian fundamentalist superhero the Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion), and is inspired by him - and his local comic shop - to become a superhero himself.

Calling himself the Crimson Bolt, Frank first tries to wait for crime, then - after an informative visit to his local library - seeks it out himself, and hits real or imagined evildoers - or just people who don't think standing in the back of a line applies to them - with his trusty wrench, following the logical catchphrase "Shut up, crime!"

But even in his new improved Crimson Bolt persona, Frank is no match for Jacques and his men, who are after all actual gangsters using actual guns. When he gets shot in the leg, Frank seeks shelter with comic shop employee Libby (Ellen Page), who had already identified him as the mysterious madmen/hero with the wrench. Soon enough, Libby turns into Frank's overenthusiastically violent "kid" sidekick Bolty. I'm sure crime will shut up now.

By all rights, I shouldn't like James Gunn's Super at all, seeing as the film belongs to the type of comedy selling itself through transgressive violence and randomness. But I found - quite to my surprise - Super to be pretty darn great.

The reason for that is not just the fact that the film's use of randomness and violence is often actually funny, but that there's an actual heart beating below the film's often cynical surface. Where your typical superhero satire of this type would be satisfied (and way too satisfied with itself for it) with pointing at its hero and sneering, Gunn's film does its outmost to also humanize him. While Frank is the butt of many a joke (as well as a violent psychopath), he's just as often treated with actual compassion and sympathy, especially in the flashbacks to his short relationship with Sarah. Impressively, most of the groundwork for said sympathetic characterization happens in the most random seeming scenes of the film. Often, Gunn manages to make his scenes at once awkward, funny, and touching.

At the same time, Super can be as tasteless and crude as anything coming from US transgressive comedies of the last few decades (or the Troma bubble Gunn started out in), with jokes about bodily fluids aplenty.

It's as if Gunn had read Mark Millar's Kick-Ass, and decided to turn it into something that's more than just an entertaining excuse for masturbatory cynicism.

 

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